Hollywood Tales
“He [Hitchcock] was a great teacher. He did it naturally, easily, and unself-consciously. In that little bit of time that I worked for him, he taught me more about screenwriting than I learned in all the rest of my career. There was one scene in Marnie, for example, where this girl is forced into marriage with this guy. I only knew how to write absolutely linear scenes. So I wrote the wedding and the reception and leaving the reception and going to the boat and getting on the boat and the boat leaving . . . I mean, you know, I kept plodding, plodding, plodding. Hitch said, ‘Why don’t we cut some of that out, Jay? Why don’t we shoot the church and hear the bells ring and see them begin to leave the church. Then why don’t we cut to a large vase of flowers, and there is a note pinned to the flowers that says, ‘Congratulations.’ And the water in the vase is sloshing, sloshing, sloshing.’
Lovely shorthand. I often think of that. When I get verbose, I suddenly stop and say to myself, ‘The vase of water.’”
— screenwriter Jay Presson Allen on working with Alfred Hitchcock